Staking Claim in Alternative Software on the Internet

By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: September 25, 1995

PALO ALTO, Calif.—
James Gosling wants to make the computer software world safe for diversity.

In his view, and in the view of many other people in the industry, the software giant Microsoft is close to crowding out all its competition.

"As far as the software business goes, Microsoft has become like death and taxes," said Mr. Gosling, the 40-year-old software wizard who is the mastermind behind the Java language. He contends that Sun Microsystems, by distributing Java freely over the Internet, will create an alternative software world that Microsoft will be unable to dominate.

A Canadian who came to the United States to attend graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University in the late 1970's, Mr. Gosling had been a hacker from the days he discovered computers while hanging around at the University of Calgary at age 13.

He had always been an electronics tinkerer. "I was always interested in building things, but in order to build things you have to have parts," he said. Software, whose parts are just digital ones and zeros, liberated him.

The Java programming language is Mr. Gosling's second effort at transforming computing with a software design that permits programs to operate over computer networks. The first project, which he began shortly after arriving at Sun in 1984, was known as NEWS, or Network Extensible Windowing System. The idea -- radical at the time -- was to enable any computer screen on a network to display a program running on any other computer on the network.

While NEWS never caught on as a commercial product, it did demonstrate the potential for distributing computer-processing power across a network. And it helped pave the way for today's so-called client/server computer networks, in which a network of desktop client computers can share programs that run on centrally located server machines.

"He has skills of making code very compact and very fast," said David Rosenthal, a software designer who joined Mr. Gosling's NEWS project after initial skepticism.

Despite its technical success, the commercial failure of NEWS taught Mr. Gosling some valuable lessons. So did the near-failure of Java, which Mr. Gosling began working on as a secret project in 1991. Conceived as a programming language for interactive television and the consumer electronics industry, the Java project was originally called Oak and was at the heart of Sun's attempt to create software for set-top television controllers.

"We got seduced by the dark side of interactive television," he said.

But by mid-1994, as the industry hype over interactive television was deflated by economic realities and a realization that neither the audiences nor the technology was ready for prime time, Sun and Mr. Gosling steered Java toward the Internet's World Wide Web -- where most of the real "information highway" action was starting to take place.

Even if Java takes off and becomes an Internet standard, Sun Microsystems may receive little direct financial benefit, Mr. Gosling acknowledges, since most people will be getting it free. But indirectly, the overall growth of the Internet is a boon for Sun, whose network server computers are the most popular way for companies, agencies and universities to connect to the global computing web. "Anything that contributes to the health of the Internet contributes to Sun's health as well," Mr. Gosling said.